Welcome to the first episode of Meet the fleet, a tour of the greatest past, present and future European space missions. Today we start with the first ESA space probe to leave the cosy confines of near-Earth orbits and dart deep into interplanetary space.

Its name was Giotto, it was launched in 1985 and its target was a regular visitor of our neighbourhood: the most famous comet of them all, named after his discoverer Mr Edmond Halley.

Now, most of the time comets are pretty dull places. They are big lumps of ice, with dust and other materials making them, quite surprisingly, among the darkest objects in the Solar System. They usually mind their own business well beyond the orbit of Pluto, but sometimes their trajectories are perturbed and they start a journey towards the Sun. The heat goes up and eventually some ice is vaporised, liberating debris and gases which form the beautiful tails we can admire in the night sky when a comet gets close enough.

Comets were once considered bad omens. Now we know that standing near a comet when it goes off does indeed bring bad luck. Its nucleus pops and fizzes like a giant Alka-Seltzer tablet, shooting particles everywhere like tiny but deadly bullets. Giotto's mission was to get as close as possible to Halley's icy mess, gathering data until damage from particle hits would become too severe and cause it to shut down.

To help Giotto aim better at the nucleus of the comet, data was sent from five other spacecraft, the so-called Halley Armada: the Soviet Vega 1 and Vega 2, the Japanese Sakigake and Suisei and the American International Cometary Explorer.

On 13 March 1986, Giotto passed at about 600 km from the Halley nucleus (close to nothing on interplanetary scales), sending back among other data the picture below (image credits: ESA), which shows a potato-shaped object about 15 km long, emitting powerful jets of gas and dust. Nobody had seen the nucleus of a comet in such detail before.

The nucleus of comet Hally as seen by Giotto

Most remarkably, Giotto was damaged (in particular its camera was lost) but not completely deactivated. The mission was extended and a new target was found. Six years later, on 10 July 1992, Giotto passed only 200 km from the nucleus of another comet, named Grigg-Skjellerup. About two weeks later all the instruments were switched off, and the mission officially ended.

Giotto still wanders through space, a silent testimony to one of the greatest examples of international scientific collaboration. A peaceful Armada from countries still divided by the Iron Curtain shed light on objects that had fascinated and frightened mankind since ancient times. The comet that terrified the Anglo-Saxons before the battle of Hastings in 1066 had become, almost a thousand years later, a symbol of peace and cooperation.